Learning from jQuery

Preface

Many developers are comfortable with using the jQuery library, which adds features to JavaScript and makes a lot of tasks easier, but they are slightly less confident when using JavaScript without jQuery. This could be because they don’t like the syntax of JavaScript and so try to avoid writing pure JavaScript as much as possible, or it could just be because they’re hoping that they’ll never have to work on a project where they can’t use jQuery. Whatever the reason, this can result in the parts of their code that aren’t using jQuery being inefficient or incorrect.

If any of this sounds like you, then this book provides an opportunity for you to expand your knowledge of the bits of JavaScript that jQuery covers up for you. In the first four chapters, we’ll cover event handling, prototypes, working with the DOM, and AJAX. Chapter 5 is about conventions in JavaScript, and covers some common conventions and patterns in JavaScript. There are also two appendixes: Appendix A aims to teach JavaScript to someone who has never written it without jQuery before, and Appendix B highlights some useful tools that you can use to aid you when coding.

You can find all the major functions from this book, such as the AJAX and event functions, and some additional code samples, on this GitHub repo.

Who This Book Is For

This book is targeted at developers who know jQuery, but who don’t yet feel confident in their JavaScript knowledge or would just like to know more. You don’t need to know everything ...